Zetas in Guatemala

According to EFE, the Zetas in Guatemala have promised terrorist attacks in the northern state of Alta Verapaz, where a bunch of heavyweights have been captured in recent weeks.

Thankfully, terrorist tactics haven't been a regular part of the Zetas modus operandi in Mexico. This makes me wonder how close the links between the groups calling themselves Zetas in Guatemala and in Mexico are. Guatemalans have been included among arrests of Zetas in Mexico for years, but the number of them is relatively low. Likewise, the leader of the 22 Guatemalan Zetas recently arrested was a Guatemalan military officer, and only one of the bunch was Mexican. The gang is often painted as a drug-smuggling group, but more than any of the other big-time DTOs, its income seems to come from locally generated activities like extortion, for which a transnational network isn't necessary. It may be that the Guatemalan Zetas are taking orders from Tamaulipas, but it seems just as likely that there are some people in Guatemala who became part of the Zetas in Mexico in the past, but now operate with a great deal of autonomy in their home country.

The Possibilities Are Endless

This could make cars a lot more fun:

Should an electric car go vroom vroom like its internal combustion ancestors, make a noise like a space ship in Star Wars or emit the tranquil sounds of birdsong?

Researchers in England considering noises to alert pedestrians and cyclists to the presence of oncoming electric cars say legislation to force silent electric vehicles (EVs) to make a warning noise is inevitable.

"It's definitely coming," Warwick University Professor Paul Jennings told Reuters. "It's being prompted by the fact that there are now real statistics."

Figures compiled by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show pedestrians and cyclists are twice as likely to be hit by a hybrid electric vehicle running silently at low speed than by a car with a normal engine.

In a perfect world, I'd go with classic calls from John Ward and Harry Carey on my car. While accelerating, touchdowns and home runs (for the Cubs). While braking, interceptions and home runs (for the opposition).

The Old Stomping Grounds Featured in the WSJ

Via the Mexico Institute, The Wall Street Journal has a terrific dispatch from Torreón about the city's police chief Carlos Villa, and his attempts to clean up the ranks of his subordinates. Highlights:

Thanks to the army, the general now has a contingent of 60 former or active-duty soldiers. None are from Torreon. They live in the police headquarters, venturing into the city only on patrol. The general lives in a single room next to his office, with a mattress, an exercise machine and a pet boxer named Chata.

For most of the soldiers, this has been their first time in a police force. "I couldn't believe the lack of discipline," said Lt. Francisco Naranjo.

After the strike, Mr. Villa was left with about 80 police from a force of 700, mostly older officers near retirement. He and his troops went on patrol several times a day and night, often taking on traffickers. "I've seen more action now than in my entire career in the army," he says.

The police chief and mayor also set about recruiting new police. Results were mixed. One applicant had just gotten out of jail for murder.

A psychologist was hired to evaluate recruits. "Most applicants were completely unfit. They had all kinds of psychological issues, including narcissism and delusions of grandeur," says Bismark Soriano, a 26-year-old psychologist.

But then a different type of person started coming through. Hortencia Ovalle, a 36-year-old housewife, heard a radio report about the general and signed up. "I wanted to be a part of something bigger for my city," she says.

A challenge will be keeping new recruits honest. Across Mexico, cartels spend an estimated $100 million a year bribing police, according to the federal government.

One new tactic: buy a home for all beat police. If a police officer stays 15 years on the force with no issues of corruption, they get the home free. "It's a way to get the wives of the cops to make sure their husbands stay on the straight and narrow," says the mayor. The city raised salaries for police from an average of $570 a month to about $800—which puts Torreon in the top five best-paid police forces in the country. Police are also getting scholarships for their children at private schools.

That last paragraph is heartening. Mexico needs to be more creative in finding ways to incentivize loyalty among police, and this is potentially a pretty good one. The gangsters have a big advantage in that they can instill fear of life and limb in a police officer in a way that the authorities cannot, but cops' services are often being bought for a pittance, with insufficient attempts by the authorities to compete for their loyalty.

Also, I wrote about some of the things Villa is confronting here and here:

I recently mentioned that the police were on strike here in Torreón, so it was kind of surprising to see two patrol trucks outside of a convenience store by my house last night. As I walked in, a uniformed officer was joking with a kid in line next to him, which was also kind of unusual, since they are typically not particularly sociable. After he paid, just before he left the premises, he turned around he said, "We're not the same police as before. Just so you know, and so you aren't suspicious of us." I have no idea of the replacements will turn out to be more honest and effective than their predecessors, but his desire to win over the customers seemed genuine, and it was an oddly moving moment. In a lot of ways, there must be no job so depressing as that of an honest municipal police officer in northern Mexico.

Dangerous for Reporters

An NGO known as the Press Emblem Campaign has named Mexico as the most dangerous country in the world for journalists in 2010, with 14 killed. In January, I wrote about Valentín Valdés, one of the first Mexican journalists to lose his life this year.

Threats to the Cities

For everyone disappointed by the absence of a hyper-specific crime stat in their stocking, Edgardo Buscaglia has a little something for you: the ubiquitous Mexican expert says that 73 percent of the nation's municipalities are under the control of criminal groups. As is often the case with his figures, the precise accuracy of this claim is hard to verify, but the general thrust here is irrefutable: Mexico's municipal governments don't have the resources to protect themselves from criminal groups.

South American Investment

Mexico invested roughly $42 billion in South American in 2010, a jump of more than $6 billion from 2009. Half of that money went to Brazil, where investments expanded by 21 percent from 2009. A big increase with Mexico overcoming its horrible 2009 was to be expected, but the 21 percent jump in investing in Brazil would seem to reflect more than the natural rebound. Shockingly, the largest investor was Carlos Slim's Grupo Carso.

Addressing the Prison Breaks

Malcolm Beith had an interesting suggestion for how to reduce the number of mass escapes from Mexican prisons:

Wardens lament that their facilities are not equipped to handle federal criminals (ie, organized crime). I understand this, and they're definitely in the right. But is NOT that hard to keep these prisons well-guarded, at least temporarily.

It's simple: use the military.

All one needs to do to secure these prisons is keep the military on constant patrol outside. You don't need more than a few humvees and well-armed soldiers, and you will provide a serious deterrent. I'm not saying that no one will try to break out, but it will be that much harder. Meantime, one can get on with cleaning up the prisons on the inside.

I have to admit I'm a bit tired of hearing how the military "arrived" on the scene of an escape or riot, when they should have already been there. I understand that Mexico prides itself on its rather open prison system (rehabilitation rather than simply incarceration) but having the military patrol OUTSIDE will not infringe on prisoners' rights, and would do nothing to affect activities on the inside. It would simply make waltzing out of a medium-security facility and hopping onto a convoy of awaiting buses, as happened in Nuevo Laredo, that much more difficult.

I don't know if this would work, but it certainly seems plausible. What's striking is nothing as creative ever leaks out of the government; all they ever do is arrest the guards and try to recapture the escapees one by one, which does absolutely nothing to discourage future escapes. Even if what Malcolm is proposing would be imperfect (and, as he implies, nothing would be more effective the organic improvement of Mexico's woeful prison system, a goal for which there's no shortcut), at the very least it is an idea.

Farc in Mexico?

Emails on the computers of recently deceased FARC commander Mono Jojoy show that the group was considering entering the kidnapping market in Mexico strictly as a financing mechanism. With the going rate for a big-time victim evidently $30 million, we can understand their eagerness, though we of course hope they remain isolated in the Colombian jungle.

Predicting the Future

A new Stratfor study predicts that the Zetas will branch out and strengthen their position in Mexico's underworld in the coming months. Trying to figure out what's coming next is an irresistible game (see here for my own recent attempt), and it's a useful exercise insofar as it helps us hone our understanding of (for lack of a more articulate phrase) why things happen. But when it comes to the internal positioning of the drug trade, a hidden industry whose meanders are determined in large part by personal enmities and predilections of psychopaths, even predictions that turn out to be right seem more a product of luck than coherent analysis.

A good counter example is the outbreak of World War I. From Lords of Finance:

...Lord Esher would declare that "new economic factors clearly prove the inanity of war," and that the "commercial disaster, financial ruin and individual suffering" of a European war would be so great as to make it unthinkable. Lord Esher and Angell were right about the meager benefits and high costs of war. But trusting too much in the rationality of nations and seduced by the extraordinary economic achievements of the era...they totally misjudged that a war involving all the major European powers would break out.

So I'm cherry-picking an extreme case, but the point is that this is a case of governments, some of them democratic, that operate out in the open and telegraph their activities to the world (at least, relative to drug gangs). And even then, most everyone's crystal ball was completely wrong.

Debate Upcoming?

Between AMLO and Marcelo Ebrard, the former figured to be the harder man to corral for an all-left debate ahead of the 2012 nomination, but the former mayor of Mexico City had a positive reaction to the idea in a recent interview. He also promised that it would be a civil affair, and that "their adversaries" wouldn't get the fight that they were hoping for. He also said that Alejandro Encinas still might be available for the Mexico State governor's race next year.

Jesús Ortega referred to such a debate as a key step in determining a candidate to unify the left for 2012, which would seem to be a big jump back from the PAN-PRD presidential alliance that he has been sporadically rumored to be considering.

How Worried Is the Obama Administration about the Arms Trade?

This story makes you question the Obama administration's commitment to helping Mexico on crime:

This spring, President Obama promised Mexican President Felipe Calderon that he would work to deter gunrunning south of the border. Behind the scenes, White House officials were putting the brakes on a proposal to require gun dealers to report bulk sales of the high-powered semiautomatic rifles favored by drug cartels.

Justice Department officials had asked for White House approval to require thousands of gun dealers along the border to report the purchases to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. ATF investigators expected to get leads on suspected arms traffickers.

Senior law enforcement sources said the proposal from the ATF was held up by the White House in early summer. The sources, who asked to be anonymous because they were discussing internal deliberations, said that the effort was shelved by then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a veteran of battles with the gun lobby during the Clinton administration.

That the gun lobby throws its ample weight around in Washington liberally is, of course, not a secret. Nor do I think that an assault-weapons ban or other efforts to limit arms traffic are the key to making Mexico safer. (I think I've written this before, but once more for the record, with stricter control of the arms trade, the big criminal gangs will most certainly still be able acquire lots of dangerous arms. Nonetheless, it would be nice to see new gun-traffic measures just for the optics of it, and I do think it would help some around the margins, especially in terms of limiting small-time gangs' capacity to buy assault rifles.) This does, however, undermine the Obama administration's rhetoric about being serious about helping Mexico in its battles with organized crime, and the fact that the Democrats are scared to battle the NRA on this is, to say the least, disheartening.

Minor Irritation

Anybody who's done much book-shopping in Mexico has probably noticed that the relationship between the text on the spine and the cover is the opposite of what it is in the US: if you have a book standing up with the cover to the right and the spine facing toward you, in Mexico the title usually reads from bottom to top, while in the US, it reads from top to bottom. In other words, you tilt your head to the left to read the title of books lined up along a shelf in Mexico, but to the right in the US. When you jump between countries but stick to each nation's respective language in your shopping, this is not a huge issue; one can quickly adjust his tendencies, browse the shelves, and find the desired book without any danger to life or limb.

However, disturbing problems do in fact emerge when one is searching for Spanish books at American bookstores, because they carry books both from Mexican and American publishers, with the latter group maintaining the same spine-to-cover typographical relationship in their Spanish divisions that they do in their English arms. The result is chaos, with mismatched spines standing back-to-back. This unfortunate circumstance forces the shopper to bob the head back and forth with an unsettling, dizzying rapidity, which makes the peruser appear to an outside observer as though he were honing his defensive tactics for an upcoming boxing match. Continuing with the pugilistic metaphor, a 30-minute visit to Barnes and Noble essentially bludgeons the brain much the way another boxer might in four rounds of combat, provided that your previous defensive training drills were fruitless. You the leave the store feeling battered. I hereby call for Congressional intervention; no Spanish-reading book-buyer should be forced to suffer this fate.

Rumors of a Kidnapping

There are reports that some 50 Central American immigrants were kidnapped in Oaxaca last week, though the Mexican government denies it. The governments of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador are asking for an investigation. Hopefully the rumors are just that, but the lack of roots and consequent vulnerability of Central Americans passing through Mexico means that they will continue to be targets, and that there have probably been far more killings than the public is aware of. After all, the murder of 70-plus migrants in Tamaulipas this summer was only discovered because one of the victims survived a coup de grace and walked dozens of kilometers with a bullet wound in his neck and mouth. Absent that impressive and unlikely feat, we may never have known what happened.

Life

An 18-year-old kidnapper has been given life in prison in Chihuahua, the first such sentence handed out in modern Mexico. The convict, Arturo Cruz, was arrested with two accomplices on November 26 with a kidnapped businessman in his custody. It's hard to have any sympathy for kidnappers, but given his age and the absence of a murder charge, Cruz seems like a bad guinea pig. It's also odd that Chihuahua's famously overstretched judicial system was able to go from arrest to life sentence in less than a month; it's almost as if some powerful new figure on the Chihuahua scene decided to make Cruz his scapegoat.

Margarita's Out, and Other Notable Comments from a Calderón Interview

In a radio interview, Felipe Calderón (and perhaps his wife deserves more of the credit here, but she wasn't speaking) wisely popped any bubble of support that threatened to form around his wife ahead of a 2012 run. Virtually the whole of the Mexican political system was united against Fox's pseudo-attempts to have Marta Sahagún run under the PAN banner in 2006, and while Zavala is much, much more appealing than Sra. de Fox, it's better to nip that in the bud.

Referring to the recent escape of 141 inmates from a Tamaulipas prison, Calderón expressed frustration with a pithy yet oddly personal line: "I grab them, they let them out".

The following portion was also interesting in that it shows Calderón aspiring to magnanimity in 2012, while he benefited from precisely the opposite choice from Fox in '06:

Asked whether the PRI would be the enemy to beat in 2012, as Andrés Manual López Obrador was in 2006, the president said no and that as long as the contest was democratic and fair, "whoever turns out to be the winner, man, woman, or party, it will be good for Mexico".

Diego's Out

Diego Fernández de Cevallos has been freed, looking not unlike Steve Carell playing biblical Noah. He said that he was treated extremely well and that he committed himself along with his captors to fight for a more just Mexico. Notwithstanding the bonhomie between captive and captors, Calderón has promised to catch those responsible. And thus ends one of the weirder episodes to occur in Mexico in the past several years. More details will be passed along as they emerge.

Off for a Spell

I'm heading out of town for a week, but I'll be back next Tuesday. I leave you with some interesting stuff about Barça's youth academy by Phil Ball:

It's easy to see how so many kids fall by the wayside because they all have to make decisions, sooner or later - but my son isn't under the roof at La Masia. One of the boys from his team was signed by Barcelona last summer, though, and is now there, under the legendary roof, separated from his parents and apparently miserable. It's not a criticism of La Masia. It's a completely normal state of affairs.

The story goes that when Messi turned up in Barcelona with his father, at the invitation of the club, it was still touch-and-go as to whether he would really stay. The club had offered to pay for the boy's hormone treatment, and to look into job possibilities for his father. But personnel at the club from that time all recall Messi as looking like he would never last the famous nine days that the club had calculated for a final decision to be made. Apparently he just sat in a corner of La Masia's reception area, looked at the floor and spoke to no-one. When his mother flew over to see if she could help out, and then was forced to return for work reasons, Messi begged to return to Argentina with her. Whoever persuaded him to stay - and most people credit Carles Rexach with that - deserves some kind of award, too.

His Ballon d'Or colleagues had a hard time of it, too. Andres Iniesta, who came from Fuentealbilla, in the province of Albacete, spent most of his first year in tears, and refused to eat for the first two weeks he was there. He still looks vaguely undernourished, but was apparently also close to packing the whole thing in, and has since admitted that if there had been the internet back then, it might have been easier.

Happy shopping everyone.

Kidnapping Details

One stat in the long Milenio Semanal piece on kidnapping that leaps out at me is that 52 percent of victims of the crime in Mexico are middle class or working class, rather than members of the economic elite. I think that this gets lost in a lot of stories that portray kidnapped people as scions of wealthy families; wealthy families are certainly obvious targets, but they are not the only ones being victimized. This is equally true with entrepreneurs and extortion; a lot of those being hit up are small-time shop owners, not major magnates. The article further estimates that the kidnapping industry is worth some $60 million annually, and that between 2 and 10 percent of the crimes are punished, which is why the death penalty alone won't do a whole lot to address kidnapping.

This quote from Isabel Miranda de Wallace, the famous mother/investigator of kidnapping victim Hugo Wallace (who was subsequently killed), is also interesting:

Kidnapping bands have transformed themselves: now that activity has turned into a 'family affair'. The father and oldest son abduct the victim, the mother feeds him, the children learn to live taking care of a person bound and gagged...

I'm not sure exactly what policy implications that shift toward familial kidnapping groups would have, but it's interesting nonetheless.

No More of the Teaching Tuta

Michoacán's educational authorities have announced that La Tuta, one of the foremost bosses of La Familia Michoacana, will be removed from the teachers lists of the state's public education system, something they had previously said would be impossible absent his arrest or death. They also said that he hasn't earned a paycheck since 2009, and not since the first part of this year as had been reported.

Funny Nacho

Ignacio Beristain, currently best known to boxing fans as the trainer of the Márquez brothers, gave an interview to Milenio regarding his recent election to the Boxing Hall of Fame and sundry other topics, and it turns out he's a pretty funny guy, in a Ted Williams sort of way:

How did you find out about your election to the Hall of Fame?

I was on the highway driving my '65 Mustang, and another car lowered the window to yell at me: "Don Nacho, we just heard that you were elected to the Hall of Fame". The motherfuckers made me park the car on the shoulder of the highway so that I could listen to them. I thought they were going to rob me.

Any wish for the New Year?

I ask Mexicans to not be such dumbasses as to vote for the PRI. And the PAN even more so. They called me from the Interior Secretariat for making these types of comments in the past. Once, in the era of Zedillo, they invited a champion of mine to Los Pinos, but they warned him: "Don't bring your trainer". Poor bastards! I still haven't eaten from the sadness of not being invited to Los Pinos.

Other comments are largely in that spirit, which seems to be lost in translation during interviews with the American boxing media. He also had some colorful criticisms of trainers who let their charges absorb tremendous beatings (he's against it), and said that De la Hoya's brother wanted him to give Oscar one more round versus Pacquiao when Beristain called it a night.

Happy Day in the Laguna

Last week's smashing of Santos by Monterrey in the vuelta of the Mexican league finals still stings, but it was nice to see the Laguna's favorite son Cristian Mijares bounce back from two years of struggles to win a world title last night. And while the opponent, Juan Alberto Rosas, won't ever draw comparisons with Sugar Ray Robinson, Mijares looked sharper than he has since beating Alexander Muñoz in spring of 2008. It was nice to see.

From the self-promotion department, I wrote a long piece about Mijares in 2008, right as he went to from being one of the pound-for-pound best in the world to being someone about whom we were all asking, What happened to that guy?

New Digs for Ricardo

Ricardo Alemán has found a new home at Excélsior, and one of his first columns is dedicated to analyzing the possibility of an alliance 2012:

Thus far, Marcelo Ebrard and Juan Ramón de la Fuente are mentioned as the possible presidential candidates, the first proposed by the Chuchos and the latter by Felipe Calderón. They are even discussions of other options to replace the ex-rector of UNAM, whose image has begun to be seen with more negatives than positives.

The first reactions to these discussions by the PRD and the PAN regarding 2012 have already produced major scandals. The first was a repeated declaration by the president that it wouldn't be unthinkable for the PAN to consider a citizen candidate from outside the PAN. This happened days after Calderón effusively praised Juan Ramón de la Fuente.

Alliances at the presidential level make no sense to me for major parties. From a national agenda-setting panista point of view, why Ebrard be so much better than Peña Nieto? The logic on the local level is logical; only the combined forces of the PAN and the PRD could bring about an end of the residual authoritarian states in Puebla and Oaxaca. But to join forces with your ideological opposite so as to keep the PRI out of the presidency and hold on to a chunk of federal jobs would be a perversion of each party's identity. And it would likely fail, because there's no way the hard left wouldn't field its own candidate. It also seems unlikely that the ambitious, presidenciable panistas would fall in line behind this.

Nonetheless, lots of people who follow the situation more closely than I keep talking about the possibility of a presidential alliance.

Another Capo Killed?

Via Boz and Malcolm and Reuters, there are rumors that La Familia big shot El Mas Loco, or Nazario Moreno if you want to go by what his mama called him, was killed in the fighting with Federal Police in Michoacán yesterday. That would bring the total of capos brought down in the past year to seven: Moreno, Nacho Coronel, La Barbie, Sergio Villarreal, Teo García, Tony Tormenta, and Arturo Beltrán. Or am I forgetting someone else? That doesn't amount to a successful counter-drug policy in and of itself, but it's a pretty striking jump given the lack of big-timers arrested under Calderón up until December 2009.